I can’t sing worth a damn and my audio engineering is even worse. But I’m looking for some feedback on a work-tape collection of mostly novelty songs, written for a fictitious musical act called Billy Bobbie Horton & His Large Mudbugs Band. There was supposed to be a story about an old, worn-out, never-has-been-never-will-be Texas singer/songwriter to go along with these musical ideas. But the story never grew any legs.

My musical skills pretty much peaked out at intermediate guitar student, and that was mostly limited to Travis-picking a few old Piedmont blues and rags on an acoustic. Never played with other musicians to speak of. Never learned how to accompany a vocalist.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I'm pretty damn musically clueless.

As a kid back in the sixties, I listened to the stuff everybody else listened to.

Then in 1973, Woody Allen released a movie called Sleeper and I heard the New Orleans Preservation Hall Band play. The sound of that Dixieland clarinet on those tracks sent me off to the back racks of the record store and to the Smithsonian mail-order catalog, discovering all kinds of music written and performed long before I was born. Everything from Reverend Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt to Benny Goodman and Johann Sebastian Bach. I don't suppose I've even turned a radio on since the early 1980's. So I don't imagine any critiques I might offer here are going to be very helpful.